Maintainability
Description
Maintainability refers to the ease with which a software system can be modified, corrected, improved or extended. These changes may include fixing bugs, enhancing performance, adapting to new environments or adding new features, all with minimal risk of introducing new defects.
Ensuring a maintainable architecture enables the data space to remain adaptable and cost-efficient over time. It supports agility, reduces operational overhead and facilitates the evolution of the system in response to changing business or technological needs. Maintainability is strongly linked to modularity and loose coupling, which promote separation of concerns and easier updates.
A maintainable system also requires a strong focus on testability. This includes the use of structured unit, integration, regression, and end-to-end tests, which not only validate correctness but also ensure that changes can be introduced with confidence and minimal risk of regressions.
Risks:
- Efforts to ensure maintainability, such as creating modular designs, thorough documentation, and extensive testing, can increase initial development time and costs.
- Emphasizing maintainability might conflict with other NFRs like performance, security, or scalability. For instance, modularity might impact system performance due to additional overhead.
- If developers are not aligned on coding standards or maintainability practices, the efforts may result in inconsistent implementations, reducing the intended benefits.
- The effort to document thoroughly for maintainability might result in outdated or excessive documentation if not maintained properly.
- Team members accustomed to less structured approaches might resist adopting maintainability-focused practices, slowing progress.
- Lack of test coverage or poor test design can compromise the ability to safely evolve the system over time.
| Non-Functional Requirement | Issue ID: SIMPL-9918 | Status: Proposed |
Detailed Non-Functional Requirements
Metrics for maintainability
Simpl-Open shall collect, monitor and analyse maintainability metrics to ...Enforce coding and development Guidelines
Simpl-Open's development lifecyle shall follow well-defined coding and ...CI/CD pipelines for code quality and maintainability
Simpl-Open's development lifecycle shall rely on CI/CD pipelines to ...Enable lossless upgrade of Simpl-Open components
Simpl-Open shall ensure that its components can be upgraded without ...